Archive for the ‘Online Materials’ Category

The Most Successful Logo Turtle in Educational Robotics

In 1983 a teacher and aspiring journalist Anth Ginn introduced me to the ideas of Seymour Papert and Turtle Robots. I loved it and set out to design my first educational robot. I was a mechanical engineer working on different contracts so I knew large numbers of talented people. I soon got a team together: Dave Ewins to do the electronics, Graham Carpenter for the software and Peter Pavlitski who organised the production. The result was the Valiant Turtle. The British Design Council included it their book the Best of British Design and I soon found out that education was how I wanted to spend my working life. We sold the last Turtle in about 2010 (we could not get the parts to make them anymore). A few days ago I came across Simon’s blog. He kindly let me add it to our records. I hope you find it interesting – Dave Catlin. (more…)

Links to Other Online Resources Relating to Logo, Turtle and Roamer

MESHGuides are designed to provide evidence-based advice to support educators’ professional judgements. TACTICS is one of the tools used to help create an effective MESHGuide. Developed by Professor James O’Meara, National Louis University, Chicago, USA the TACTICS Framework provides and independent standard we can use to evaluate the structure and strategy underpinning the design of Roamer Activities. This presentation shows how Roamer Activities are TACTICS compliant. (more…)

Development of an interactive system to treat patients with movement impairments of the upper extremity is described. Gestures and movements of patients as instructed by therapists are detected by accelerometers and feedback is provided directly to the patient via a robot. (more…)

AnthTronix developed CosmoBot a robotic toolkit designed to improve therapy, education, and play for children with disabilities. By adding CosmoBot to Roamer you extend the robot’s capacities. In this, it offers one solution to the issues identified in the Special Educational Robot Project (SERP). This paper outlines the toolkit and presents case study data to support the design. (more…)

BBC Horizon TV Programme on Logo and Turtle Robots

In 1969, when he created the Turtle robot Seymour Papert became the father of educational robots. Papert worked for MIT and became a consultant for Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) Technologies. As part of that work he invented LOGO a computer language for education. These were the days of before desktop computers existed. People were creating high-level computer languages for specific purposes. For example, they’d invented FORTRAN for mathematics, science, and COBOL for business. When Papert devised LOGO he included Turtle Graphics – a new approach to geometry. When students programmed a Turtle robot they used mathematics to explore the world around them. The BBC Horizon television series showed Talking Turtle in 1983. It tells the story of Papert, his work and its development at MIT and Edinburgh University.